Electronic messaging has become pervasive. For instance, e-mail has become mission-critical for many businesses in enabling employees to communicate. Generally, people are relying on e-mail more than ever. As a result, the consequences of a recipient not receiving an e-mail can be significant. There are a number of reasons why an e-mail may not be received and/or read by the designated recipient. For example, the e-mail may have been lost in transit due to a network or host failure. Or, an e-mail may be filtered out by a spam filter, which filters out so-called junk e-mail, at the sending side or at the receiving side. Moreover, different e-mail providers use different spam filters, and the filters are always evolving. Thus, an e-mail that may have been successfully received in the past may not be received in the future if re-sent. Further, an e-mail may not be read simply because the recipient did not check his or her e-mail inbox.
PCT patent application no. WO 02/065349 (referred herein after as '349) discloses a trackable electronic document method and/or system seeks to provide that a recipient is not required to separately log into a web-page to view a document, such as an invoice, nor does the trackable electronic document method and/or system require the recipient to open an attachment. The trackable electronic document method and/or system also seeks to allow documents, such as invoices, to be presented in substantially or exactly the same format as the printed document would appear. Furthermore, the trackable electronic document method and/or system can generate a display receipt when the document, such as an invoice, is displayed in the body of an e-mail received by a recipient. The display receipt is automatically returned to the server.
Patent application '349 suffers from critical limitations while proving the conversion of an email document to an image on the sender's computer. This operation requires special conversion software which has to be installed onto the sender's computer.
Moreover, the system and the method disclosed in patent application '349 can not be regulated. In other words, the content of the image which had been converted on the sender's computer might be edited by said sender, or by anyone else before the image is sent to the server. This limitation creates reliability and privacy issues.
Yet more, such a conversion of an electronic message to an image usually requires computational time and resources from the sender's computer.
Therefore, there is a long felt need to develop a system which provides delivery confirmation for electronic messages in a flexible, a time-efficient, and a user-friendly manner which is compatible across different electronic messaging systems, and which maintains privacy of recipients and reliability regarding the contents of the electronic messages delivered by the system.